Opinion | Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable
nytimes.com
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Opinion | Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable
For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
Anastasia Berg • On the Aesthetic Turn | The Point Magazine
Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance. They'
... See moreSarah Schulman • The Gentrification of the Mind
I don’t think we’ve ever needed genuine works of art — imaginative creations that press us to see the world in larger or at least different ways than our standard everyday media-navigation categories allow — more than we do now. But our current resources are few, because of the ways the major art-related organizations have lost any discernible sens... See more
ayjay • art for humanity’s sake – The Homebound Symphony
David Pennington added
When it comes to art/ literature, airing on the side of the older typically seems to do us better. But the idea of criticism and gatekeeping is keeping some of the best ideas in a box.
Just because it doesn’ twork with your mentality doesn’t mean it’s not the lifesaver someone else is looking for.
But what I was becoming so frustrated with, and the reason I felt more and more like not teaching, was that I believed that art was not a moral enterprise. That morality in art was what happened when the church or the state got involved. That if you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits.
Julia May Jonas • Vladimir: 'Favourite Book of the Year' Vogue
We are so used to understanding the purpose of art in Romantic terms, as the fruit of individual artistic genius, that we forget that for most of history art had a plainer and more direct purpose: it was a tool of education. The point of art was to render tough or knotty lessons easier to absorb; to nudge our recalcitrant minds towards accepting id
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
When it came to art, I only cared about content: what a work meant. The whole point of Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful was to destroy that image of beauty. Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be use
... See more